Aging and Spectro-Temporal Integration of Speech.
John H Grose, Heather L Porter, Emily Buss
PMID 27742880WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with normal hearing integrated fragmented speech as well as younger adults in this lab test.
Age did not reduce performance across most conditions. Only the mid-age group had an unexplained drop when bands were split between ears.
Key findings
01Age group did not show a significant overall difference in word recognition across the main conditions.
02A significant interaction showed that the mid-age group recognized speech worse when the low and high bands were split between ears than when both were in one ear.
03Adding 10-Hz interruptions to the two-band monaural speech lowered performance to single-band baseline levels, and alternating the interrupted bands across ears produced intermediate performance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
10 participants per age group is small, so the mid-age dichotic finding could be chance. Participants had normal hearing, so results may not apply to patients with hearing loss or communication disorders. The test used narrow filtered speech and a 10-Hz interruption rate, which may not match everyday listening. Continuous two-band scores were high, so ceiling effects may have hidden age differences. Listening effort was not measured. The supplementary dataset used different participants.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that older adults can easily understand speech in everyday fluctuating noise. The study tested normal-hearing adults in a lab with narrow filtered speech and a 10-Hz interruption rate, so it does not show that real-world speech-in-noise difficulty is absent.